From The Writers' Room

Cassandra Rose Clarke on writing The Witch Who Came In From The Cold - Episode 12: "She'll Lie Down In The Snow"

WITCH_COVER_EP_12_FINAL_text

One of the biggest challenges about writing for Cold Witch is also one of its biggest joys, and that’s the collaborative nature of the project. I’m writing these episode notes on the heels of the story symposium for Season 2, and so the pleasures of a collaborative writing project are fresh in my mind: the hours spent spinning out ideas, watching them bounce off of each other and braid together, the story emerging over the course of a weekend like we’re all chipping away at marble. When it’s all said and done you don’t even remember which idea was yours, and it doesn’t matter. The thing belongs to all of you.It’s fabulous.Writing episode 12, though, revealed the trickier side of collaborative writing. Picture, if you will, me, when it came time to write the episode that would later be known as “She’ll Lie Down in the Snow.”The Season 1 symposium is a distant memory; I have my outline, stamped with approval from my fellow writers, and photographs of our storyboard from that February weekend long ago. I read through both, squinting at the hand-scrawled notecards. They are a mystery. A code. One reads, simply, Chess! In fairness, though, writing the episode wasn’t the tricky the part. That came in revisions. Episode 12, like most penultimate episodes, is at once a convergence of plot threads and a set-up for the fantastic season finale (no spoilers), which meant it had a lot of work to do, structurally speaking. Events had to fall into place just so. My original draft used that old writer’s cheat of moving the characters into place just so they could propel the plot along, but no editor worth their salt is going to let that through. No one was going to let me fake this.In the end, publisher Julian, head writer Lindsay, and me, sat down for a conversation over Google hangouts wherein we held a mini-symposium of our own, hammering out the plot of episode 12 so that it would be honest to the characters as they had already been developed throughout the course of the season. It was difficult, but also satisfying—you know that feeling you get when you solve a really tough calculus problem? That was how I felt walking away from the meeting. Energized, I was able to sit down and rework the episode until it fit into the gap between episodes eleven and thirteen, bridging the plot just how it should.

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